'P.O.V.,' Tuesday, June 28, 10-11:30 p.m. EDT, on PBS. Update - can't find it listed, at least in my area

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

It takes hardly a minute—the briefest of opening scenes—to recognize the powers of "My Perestroika," a work of such exhilarating depth and humor as to make it seem impossible at times to appreciate, fully, the scope of the history it manages to encompass along the way. Yet history is the dominant actor here, the leading presence in these portraits of five Muscovites. Now in their early 40s, they were the last generation of children schooled in the Soviet system. From their commentaries, their memories and a great bounty of dramatic footage, documentarian Robin Hessman has extracted a picture of these lives and their times extraordinary for its vitality and color.

That time span in question—from the last years of the Soviet Union to Vladimir Putin's Russia—brought changes that the film's subjects would have found inconceivable when they were members of the Young Pioneers in a Soviet Union led by Leonid Brezhnev. They were children then, and they were happy, the exuberant Lyuba, now a wife, mother and history teacher, recalls.

The film's smashing opening footage of schoolchildren paying tribute to Mr. Brezhnev—a young orator delivers thanks to the leader for allowing them to live in "the country of happy childhood" and for guiding the struggle for world peace—has driven her point home unforgettably. That footage includes a familiar image—a lineup of deeply somber, dark-suited and hatted members of the Soviet bureaucracy waving in unison from the dais. A chilling sight however often seen, though not, of course, to the devoted children—members of the Young Lenin Guard—marching by.

To have been a part of the beautiful Soviet reality as a child brought Lyuba both satisfaction and a sense of privilege, she reports. Every time she heard about riots and shootings in the West, her only thought was of gratitude. "My God! I am so lucky to be living in the Soviet Union!"

It was undeniably fun to be a child in this Soviet Union, where contests were held—they were widely covered by the press—for the best poster against nuclear arms, against the Star Wars plan and the like. All was woven into daily life, she says with a giggle: You went to school, you ate, you worked for peace. One way children of the Soviet Union could advance peace, they were taught, was through projects that would help the embattled revolutionaries in Nicaragua. As everywhere else in this film, the testimony comes richly illustrated—here, with film clips of children having the time of their lives struggling for world peace.

Neither Lubya nor her husband, Borya, also a history teacher, could have foreseen when they were young the transformed views they would one day hold about the Soviet Union. Borya now teaches students about the horrors of the past—about collectivization, the deportations, the gulag: crimes so enormous they are, he says, impossible to grasp.

Life had changed when Mikhail Gorbachev came along in the 1980s, and with him glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring)—reformations that utterly transformed the atmosphere. Borya, a rebel against the system from adolescence on, now found himself in a different country—one so free it was now possible even to impugn Lenin himself as a force of evil. Though not to everyone, as Lubya discovered. As far as her mother was concerned, besmirching Lenin was too much, glasnost or no glasnost.

But how many people now remember that word, or perestroika and what it once meant to the citizens of the U.S.S.R.? It would have been inconceivable, says Andrei, a successful entrepreneur and a classmate of Borya, to have thought when he was a boy that he could ever own a business of his own. He now owns a chain of upscale clothing stores for men. His large apartment, gleaming with modernity, attests to prosperity, unlike the cluttered close quarters of the history teachers Lubya and Borya.

But liberalization had brought, along with freedoms, other things. Suddenly there were spectacles like mass healings in Moscow Stadium. There were spiritualists on the television screen. The cause, suggests the brooding Ruslan, a former member of the popular punk rock group NAIV, was the absence of the ideology, the uplifting messages, that had fed the society in the past. "All the crazy claims, the constant Soviet talk about how a milkmaid had milked a millions tons." Things like that, ridiculous as they were, they had heard all their lives, and they had made an impression on people. Now, there were healers and preachers. And, observes Ruslan—also people wondering where their fatherland is.

Still, for Borya and Lubya and their friends, the times of glasnost, perestroika and the freedoms they had brought now seem a golden age—a period when it seemed to matter whether a person voted, and how. That is not the case today, Borya says. For these former children of the old Soviet system, there is in Vladimir Putin's Russia a strong whiff of a too-familiar past. Even so, the film's buoyancy comes through in force right to the end—a perfect ending, perfectly moving and reflective of the lives and characters we've come to know here.